The Garrick’s Head

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Until fairly recently you could still buy books at Jane Austen’s favourite bookshop, in Winchester. I forget what it was called. It was on a little alley leading from the high street to the cathedral close. I bought the odd book there, over the years, but more often just browsed its bowed and overcrowded shelves for that sense of contiguity with the pre-Dickensian golden age of the novel – occasionally thumbing a shelf edge perhaps pre-scanned by Austen herself, rummaging for some new anti-Jacobin treatise by her beloved Edmund Burke.